Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Greco-Roman mythology, Rick Riordan, and/or their otherwise respective owners.
Author's Notes: Hi, all! Today's chapter has some changes for you previous readers – not much, but some, just so you know.
Hope y'all enjoy, and until next week,
~TGWSI/Selene Borealis
Μὰ μητέρα – By (my) mother/I swear to (my) mother
Μὰ θάλασσαν – By the sea/I swear to the sea (not Thalassa herself, that would be with a Θ instead, fyi!)
~The Finding Home Saga~
~Finding Home~
~Chapter 18: The Lotus Hotel & Casino Pt. 2~
"Shit," I cursed. "Shit, shit, shit..."
Nico stared at me uncomfortably. "That's not a nice word," he said.
"Yeah, well, it doesn't fucking matter," I replied, before I grabbed him by the wrist and started to walk towards where I had last seen Katie. "At least, not when we need to find your sister."
Nico wasn't listening to me, though. As soon as I had grabbed his wrist, he began to struggle, and exclaimed, "Hey! Let me go! I want to go back to the Mythomagic game!"
I ignored his protests, because inside, I was screaming. If Nico and his sister had been here since 1938, how long had I been here? It had only seemed like a couple of hours since Silena, Katie, and I had checked in, but was it really? And why had we come here in the first place? I tried to remember why, but it was hard to, as if a fog had settled in my brain. I knew that we were going to Los Angeles, and that we were supposed to find the entrance to the Underworld. I knew, too, that my mother was there...but, for a second, I had trouble remembering her name, until it came to me, as clear as day. Sally. Sally Estelle Jackson. That was her name. I had to find her, and I had to stop the gods from causing World War III or some other worldwide disaster in the process.
Katie wasn't that far from where I had last seen her, playing what looked to be some sort of farm simulator. "Katie," I said as soon as I walked over to her, Nico still struggling against me all the while. "Come on. We've got to get out of here."
There was no response.
I shook her shoulder. "Katie, come on."
She looked up, annoyed. "What?"
"We need to leave."
She frowned. "Leave? What are you talking about? I've just gotten the barn set up!"
"Look, this place is a trap," I told her, gesturing for her to look at Nico for emphasis. "Nico here says he's been here with his sister since 1938, and I've seen kids look like they're from the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Whatever this place is, it's manipulating us in some way into making us want to stay here so that we never leave. And we aren't aging, either. It's creepy and we need to leave and finish our quest before any more time passes than what already has."
At first, Katie just glared at me with slightly glassy eyes. But then, she blinked and shook her head. "Are you serious?"
I nodded. "As serious as I can be."
Her face paled. Quickly, she looked over at Nico and his clothes, then whispered, "How long have we – "
"I don't know," I said. "But we've got to find Silena and his sister and get out of here."
To be honest, I didn't really know why I wanted to bring Nico with us so badly – I just knew that, for some reason, he hadto come with us. There was just something about him that was different from all of the other kids, something about his wide eyes and black hair that made me think he was familiar, somehow. Like I was supposed to know him.
Idly, I wondered about why that could be, but I didn't spare the idea much further thought, because Katie and I were too busy trying to find Silena.
As we searched, Nico slowly became less and less resistant to me tugging him along everywhere we went. At first, I thought it was because he was either getting tired or had realized that I wasn't going to let go of him anytime soon, but then he looked up at me with those wide eyes of his and asked me in a defeated voice, "It...it isn't 1938 anymore, is it?"
I grimaced. I didn't really want to break the fact that it had been almost seventy years since he had first come to this place to him until after we'd all escaped (assuming we could, anyways...but I was cautiously optimistic about that, considering how all of the workers seemed to be high and there were no buff security guards in sight), but I knew that this kid wasn't going to let such a fact go. No way in hell. So, with a sigh, I said, "No. No, it's not."
"Th – then what year is it?" he asked.
"2006," Katie supplied helpfully. When I turned to glare at her, she threw her hands up into the air and said, "What? You were about to coddle him just like how Luke coddles all of the new campers in his cabin, but we don't have time for that. Not when gods know how much time has passed and we need to find not just Silena, but apparently this kid's sister, too."
"I'm not a kid!" Nico protested.
She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, sure," she said flippantly, before her face lightened up and she pointed. "There she is!"
Both Nico and I turned to look at where she was pointing. Sure enough, there was Silena, standing in front of a makeover game and looking as if she was having the time of her life. It almost made me feel a little bad about taking her away from the game, but I knew we had places to go, people to see, monsters to defeat, and godly spats to break up still, and we couldn't spend any more time here than necessary because of it.
"Oh, she's pretty," Nico whispered to me.
I ignored him.
"Silena!" I called out. The three of us approached her rather cautiously, knowing all too well that it might not be easy to get her to come with us, considering how hard it was for me to get Katie and Nico to listen to me in the first place and the tools (read: powers) she had in her arsenal. "Silena, it's time to go!"
"What?" she asked briefly, turning to look at us, a frown marring her beautiful face. "What do you mean? We've only been here a few hours!"
"I know it seems like that," I said. "But I have a feeling that we've been here for much longer. Take Nico here for example."
Hurriedly, I then explained to her what I had explained to Katie. She initially didn't look like she wanted to believe me, but by the end of my speech her face was pale and her kaleidoscope eyes were shining. "Oh, no," she moaned, looking as if she was going to be sick. "I can't believe it! We're going to be in so much trouble if we missed the deadline! Like, we're facing instant death-type trouble, assuming the world hasn't already ended!"
I winced. "We know, Silena."
"Μὰ μητέρα, we have to leave right now!" she cried, acting as if she hadn't heard me – but then again, given the near-panic attack that she was having, she probably hadn't.
Before she could say anything else, I interjected, "No, we can't. We have to find Nico's sister first."
Silena blinked. Then, she frowned and turned to look at Nico, giving him a once-over that told me she didn't quite know what to make of him. "'His sister?'" she repeated. "What, are we breaking them out of here, too? Why?"
"I don't know," I admitted. Like I had said before, I truthfully didn't know why I felt the need for them to come with us, I just did. "But I know that they have to come with us, because they're important. Like, majorly important."
Silena bit her lip. "Okay," she said after a few moments. "I mean, if there's one thing this quest has proven, Percy, it's that I can trust you. So I will." Then, she turned to look at Nico again, except this time her face was expectant and her voice was a lot more sympathetic. "Hey, Nico, can you tell me about your sister? What her name is? What she looks like?"
Nico wrinkled his nose. "Don't talk to me like that," he said. "I'm not a baby!"
Nevertheless, though, he spent the next few moments quickly telling us about his sister. Apparently, Bianca was only three years older than him – she was thirteen and he was ten, not eleven – and she looked a lot like him. She had the same inky black hair, except hers was curled like Katie's and Silena's and not messy like mine, along with the same dark brown eyes, olive skin tone, and smattering of freckles that Nico had. She was also wearing clothing that was similar to his, except where he was wearing a shirt and pants, she was wearing a dress, complete with a floppy green hat.
"Oh, I think I saw her at the rock-climbing wall a little while ago," Katie said. "Didn't really talk to her, though. Just saw her."
Nico smiled. "Well, Bianca does like to do stuff like that," he said.
With that being said, the four of us started to walk towards the other side of the lobby, where the rock-climbing wall was. Even from the distance that we were at – which was pretty far away, because again, the lobby was huge – I could see a black-haired girl in a '30s dress climbing her way up the wall with relative ease, as if she had been born to climb and had been a natural at it all her life. It made me kind of jealous, actually, because I knew that if she were to climb the climbing wall at camp, she would make it up to the top no problem like Katie had. Not like me, when I had almost gotten third degree burns from the entire thing.
Unfortunately for us, though, about halfway through our trek across the giant room, one of the bellhops noticed us. It wasn't the same one from before, but he was wearing the same getup and had the same goofy smile on his face, along with those weird lilac-pink eyes. "Hey, kids!" he greeted us. "Are you ready for your platinum cards?"
Despite having just been told he'd been stuck in this place for almost seventy years, Nico perked up. "Platinum cards?" he asked the bellhop.
Μὰ θάλασσαν, the attention span on this kid is even worse than mine.
The bellhop nodded. "We just added an entire new floor full of games for our platinum-card members!" he exclaimed. "So come on, take one! You deserve it!"
He held out the cards, and I wanted one. Badly. But I knew that if I took one, I'd never leave. I'd stay here, just like Nico and all of the other kids, happy forever, playing games forever, and soon I'd forget my mom, my quest, Luke, and maybe even my own name. And I didn't want that, no way in hell. So, with as much force as I could manage, I said, "Thanks, but no thanks. The four of us will be leaving just after we find Nico's sister here."
Nico still looked like he wanted to accept the card, but at my words, he suddenly nodded defiantly. "Yeah," he agreed. "We're just staying long enough to find my sister."
The bellhop's smile became strained. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Such a shame, really...especially when we have so many things to do here..."
Silena, Katie, and I all shared a look. We'd had enough experience with monsters and asshole gods by now to know to suspect something was up with this guy. With the best stealth I could manage, I reached into my pocket and grabbed Riptide, fiddling with it as i watched the bellhop's smile only become more and more strained. "Yeah, we're sure."
"I'm sorry," the bellhop said then. "But I'm afraid that, while you three may go, Nico and his sister must stay with us."
I frowned and shifted my feet, getting ready for the inevitable fight. "Why?"
"'Why,' what?" the bellhop retorted with faux pleasantness.
"Why do Nico and Bianca have to stay?"
"I'm afraid the matter doesn't concern you," he said. "Now, if you will please go...I have platinum cards to give out to everyone else..."
I gritted my teeth, before I pulled out Riptide and uncapped it, causing the sword to appear. Silena did much of the same with her dagger, while Katie started to grow her vines.
Nico didn't really do anything except whimper, but that was alright, because I was pretty sure I didn't want a ten-year-old fighting one of my battles, anyways.
"No," I said, with more force than before. "We're leaving, all of us. Now. And if you can't deal with that – "
I didn't get to finish my threat.
As we had been chatting with the bellhop in front of us, more of his fellow employees had been walking towards us. They all had the same lilac-pink eyes as him, which now that I thought about it, looked glazed...and not just like they were high. All at once, I knew who they were, as the itch in my mind supplied me with the necessary information: they were the Lotus-Eaters, the people who Odysseus had encountered in the myths and had almost lost some of his men too.
...Of course, in the myths, the Lotus-Eaters hadn't really cared about anything except for their precious flower. I didn't really understand why they were caring about Nico and his sister so much here, but it didn't matter. As they converged on us mindlessly, like the zombies from Night of the Living Dead, I knew one thing and one thing only: we were getting out of here, all of us.
"BIANCA!" Nico screamed.
Just then, Katie used her vines to bring a few of the Lotus-Eaters down to the ground, the plants wrapping around their legs and leaving cuts from their sharp thorns. Silena sauntered forward and stabbed the ones Katie had toppled with her dagger, causing them to vanish into golden puffs of dust, while I swiped a few into oblivion with my sword.
...Huh, guess the Lotus-Eaters are monsters. Who knew?
But, of course, our escape wasn't that easy. As soon as we had killed a few of the Lotus-Eaters, more came towards us to take their place, all of them with horrible and blank smiles etched on their faces. They were encircling us, entrapping us, so that we had nowhere else to go.
Although I knew that I would probably knock myself out again with any water that I summoned, I couldn't help but search for it as Silena, Katie, and I maneuvered ourselves so that we were all standing around Nico, looking for something, anything that would respond to the tug coming from behind my navel. At first, I didn't feel anything at all, but then there was something, something big and deep and churning right from underneath our feet.
It was the water from the pipes, I realized.
"Hey," I whispered to Katie. "I've got an idea."
"Does it involve you controlling water?" she whispered back.
"...Maybe?"
"Percy!"
"Just wait for my signal, okay?" I said.
"What signal?" Silena butted in, a little snidely.
I ignored her in favor of focusing on controlling the water beneath us as much as I could. It wasn't easy – in fact, it was the most difficult thing I had ever tried to do up until that point, because there was so much water and my control over it was so little. But, as we continued killing the Lotus-Eaters, I was able to get almost all of the water underneath my control. Which was good, because almost all of it was all that I needed for my plan to work.
Just as one of the Lotus-Eaters was about to take a swipe at me with his fist, I made my move. "Okay, now!" I shouted, lifting the water up through a combination of my hands like Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender and the tug.
The effect was instantaneous. As all of the Lotus-Eaters moved to attack us, water burst up from the floor and sprayed them all in the face. They all let out vicious, inhuman shrieks in response, while I quickly grabbed Silena, Katie, and Nico. "You all ready for a ride?" I shouted.
"No!" they screamed in unison.
I grinned. As much as I was able to, I moved the water so that it was tunneling us and all of the other kids, all of the way from the climbing wall to the front of the lobby, to the entrance of the hotel. I realize that this sounds like a lot of power, and I'm sure that if I wasn't as immersed in the water as I was, I would've passed out already. But, in the moment, all I could feel was the feeling of being alive, and it was the most exhilarating thing I had ever felt.
We all burst through the doors of the Lotus Hotel & Casino, riding on a wave of water that dispersed as soon as we got outdoors. All of the other kids – Silena, Katie, and Nico included – were shouting and screaming, but I could only laugh at their antics as the water healed the spot from behind my navel and stopped the power-exhaustion that I was beginning to feel in its place.
The Lotus-Eaters didn't even try to follow us.
"Dio Mio!" Nico shouted, once he had quickly gotten over his screaming. Vaguely, I couldn't help but think that the way he said Dio instead of...whatever the plural form of it was, was a little weird. "That was so cool! Percy, how did you do that? And why did the bellhops try to attack us? And where's my – oh, there she is! Bianca, Bianca, you have to come over here and meet these bambini! They saved us!"
A few yards away from us, Nico's sister Bianca was sitting in the water, her eyes wide. She looked at Nico like she couldn't believe what was happening, but I guess she probably didn't...and not just because she hadn't been with us when I flooded the hotel, either.
But I couldn't focus on that. Not right now, anyways. No, I had to focus on the fact that, while it felt like late morning, about the same time of day we had gone into the hotel and casino at, it was no longer sunny like it had been before. Instead, it was stormy, with dark clouds overhead and heat lightning flashing out in the desert. Ares' backpack was slung over my shoulder once again, even though I had thrown it out in trash can in room 4001.
Shakily, I got to my feet and ran to the nearest newspaper stand, willing some of the water to stay on me all the while so that I didn't pass out from exhaustion. First, I read the year on the newspaper and breathed out a sigh of relief, because thank the gods, it was still 2006. But then I noticed the date, June 20th, and my blood ran cold, because not only had we been in the Lotus Hotel & Casino for seven days, but we had only one day left until the summer solstice.
One day left to complete the quest.
Word Count: 3,245
Next Chapter Title: I Have A Talk With The Lady Styx
